They were doing God-knows-what in the middle of nowhere when it appeared in the distance — a boat abandoned in the mid 1920’s when the ice came early. Two decades later an Inuit hunter placed his kayak aside and climbed on board. The weather was terrible and he got out quickly. No one knows what he saw exactly, except for the numbers on the side of the hull. A party of snowmobilers spotted the ship in the early 1980s (the last report to date).

I didn’t keep the article about this (leaving it with the rest of the newspaper on a restaurant table) but I still find myself imagining the ship’s steel surfaces (made in Oslo and bought by the Hudson Bay Company) polished harshly by constant wind, reflecting sunlight in small, sharp flashes.

Can anyone be that alone — off the grid, rusting and empty?
I’ve had no feeling momentarily. I’ve dis-associated. I’ve tried to walk away from it all, but it was never anything like this.

Terrorists are pin-pointed by heat sensor satellites. The opening of a new Casino in the Nevada Desert is photographed from space. A Vietnam draft dodger is arrested at the border after decades on the lam. Wealthy parents implant tracking devices under their children’s scalps.

You continue to drift without detection — abandoned, unusable.

You’ve found the world before science, before our desires, the world off the map where value doesn’t mean anything. Your appearance on the horizon is never a premonition of transcendence. No one is going to cross the ocean. No one will be spirited away when you visit.

You embody the indifference waiting us out.
That’s the horror of your lot.